Java EE 6: A Better Development Experience Awaits!

Enterprise Java standards have come a long way since 1998, when
the first release of Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB) emerged. In 1999
the Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) platform was created, grouping
EJB together with a suite of enterprise technologies and launching
what was to become a comprehensive and practical set of vendor and
developer standards for enterprise applications. The Java
Enterprise Edition (Java EE) 6 specification, released in December
of 2009, is the latest installment of that dynasty and has already
started to make its mark on the Java community.

Who needs standards? In an era of substantial IT budgets (often
measured in millions of dollars), most people see the value of
standards. Companies win because their software investments are
more protected than if they were to invest in proprietary
technologies. If their relationship with a particular vendor turns
sour, or their trust in its future is in question, or even if they
just feel they can get more value elsewhere, they can change the
underlying product that implements the standards to which their
applications are written. They can also more easily find and hire
developers to work on those products, since a standard set of
well-defined technologies provides a common foundation and
vocabulary for training, communicating, and assessing developer
skills. But it’s not just the corporations that benefit from the
existence of standards. Developers are also better off because
their knowledge and experience is transferable across jobs and
across implementations. They are not left stranded in a “dead-end
job”, accumulating knowledge of little use outside of their
immediate work environment.

Even vendors appreciate the value of standards, since by
implementing standards they know that they have a greater chance of
selling their software to a company that is risk averse. Product
offerings will be more widely applicable and more readily
consumed.

Too Slow and Too Fast

Technology changes at a pace unlike almost any other industry,
prompting some to claim that a two to three year Java EE release
cycle is just too long. They complain that too many new programming
innovations occur between releases and that it takes too long to
incorporate these into the platform. On the other hand, corporate
IT folks complain that releases are too close together. A company
with a software system containing three million lines of code
cannot easily upgrade it to use a new technology. The momentum of
massive software makes it simply impossible to make large changes
in short periods of time. For these companies, changing the
standards too quickly renders their systems obsolete sooner and
makes it more difficult to find people to work on them.

Most people recognize the balancing act that must be followed.
For a standard to be successful it must be adopted not only by the
consultants, who are eagerly riding the bleeding edge of as many
new technologies as they can fit into an application, but by
corporations with large systems. New technology innovations should
be given some time in the testing grounds of practice before being
incorporated into the specification.

Adopting new practices before they have reached widespread
adoption or been proven to be of value would place the platform at
risk and be doing a disservice to both the platform implementors
and the users.

Breaking it Down

The Java EE 6 platform offers some new and exciting features to
attract new developers, as well as some significant enhancements to
some of the known stalwart specifications. We haven’t got the space
to describe all of the changes in this article so we will focus
primarily on the novel aspects of Java EE 6 and the new
specifications that have been added. But before we break into the
details let’s take a high level look at the Java EE 6 platform and
the various specifications that make it up. Table 1 gives a brief
description of each sub-specification and the changes that were
made to it in Java EE 6.

With six new specifications added and thirteen updated it is
clear that Java EE 6 is not your mother’s enterprise Java platform.
Java EE has indisputably undergone a fairly dramatic evolution in
terms of how developers can program applications.

Targeting the Web

One of the major thrusts of the release was to make web
application development easier than ever. To this end, three major
areas of improvement were pursued: creating a special profile
tailored to web applications, features for more convenient web
component development, and simpler archive packaging to round off
the experience.

A separate Java EE profile for web applications is really just
an instance of a more general profiling concept. The idea is that a
given class of application may typically only make use of a subset
of Java EE technologies, and that by defining a profile around that
set it will be easier to produce and consume the software relevant
to that application type. Vendors can implement and sell just the
parts that are included in that profile, yet still be able to
market it as a fully compliant profile.

Developers can purchase only the software they need for their
applications without having to pay for or develop with the entire
Java EE stack. It represents a reduction of both the development
and production runtime footprints.

Given the prominence that web applications has in the industry
right now a Web Profile was the obvious first profile candidate.
The Web Profile was defined to contain enough for most web
applications to do what they need, while leaving out the
technologies that the majority of web applications don’t use. The
following specifications make up the Web Profile. The version of
each of these is the same as the one listed in Table 1.

• EJB Lite

• Servlet

• JavaServer Pages (JSP)

• Expression Language (EL)

• Java Transaction API (JTA)

• JSP Debugging

• Java Standard Tag Library (JSTL)

• JavaServer Faces (JSF)

• Common Annotations

• Java Persistence API (JPA)

• Bean Validation

• Managed Beans

• Interceptors

• Dependency Injection for Java

• Contexts and Dependency Injection

You may have noticed that the list does not specify EJB, but
rather EJB Lite, a subset of EJB that includes only the more
current POJO style components. The older components, based on an
EJBHome and EJBObject client view, as well as some other portions
of the specification that are seldom used for web applications, are
not part of EJB Lite.

Many features have been added into the web and presentation
components, as well as the new specifications (to be discussed
later) that can be used in web components, but it suffices to say
that creating presentation objects is much more convenient and
flexible now than in previous releases. Support for annotations,
asynchronous returns, AJAX, standardized facelets, validation,
advanced injection, and more, puts more power into the hands of web
developers and requires less effort.

Lastly, packaging a web archive was rendered less complicated
for applications that have more than just web artifacts and
persistent entities. Using transactional business components to
encode the domain logic has long been accepted as a best practice,
and up until now EJBs needed to be in a separate JAR file. An
application that used both EJBs and web components needed to create
an EAR file to house both the WAR and the JAR files. The packaging
requirements have been loosened in EE 6 to allow EJB components to
be packaged in WAR files, making an EJB JAR file completely
unnecessary and an EAR file similarly unwarranted. The WAR file is
the new application archive, and web applications that rely only on
the Web Profile can be packaged completely within a single WAR
file, from servlets and JSPs to EJBs and JPA persistence units.
Figure 1 shows how a trivial application needed to be packaged in
Java EE 5 and how it can be packaged in Java EE 6.

New Specifications

At this point we will introduce some of the specifications that
are brand new to this release. With so much to say and so little
space to say it in we can only give a taste of some of the added
features of these specifications, but it should be enough to make
the improvements obvious. We will not go into JASPIC because it is
strictly a Service Provider Interface (SPI) for internal use within
the container, and we won’t discuss interceptors because they
existed in the previous release as part of the EJB specification
and are therefore not really new.

RESTful Web Services

Because JAX-RS existed in 1.0 form before being included in Java
EE 6 it had already become fairly widely adopted. Adding the 1.1
version to Java EE 6 gave it an enterprise blessing and ensured an
integration with other Java EE components.

The simplicity of REST makes it an attractive alternative to
SOAP-based protocols and also enables an existing enterprise
application to easily export parts of itself as web services. A few
annotations and a simple configuration model unite to create an
almost effortless service creation experience. Listing 1 shows part
of a root resource class for a RESTful web service.

The @Path annotation specifies the URI that directs a
request to be serviced by this resource class. The URI is always
relative to the server and can contain any number of variable
names, each enclosed by curly braces and separated by slashes. For
example, the path in Listing 1 is specified as
/employee/{id}, meaning that a request with a URI of the
form
http://someserver.com/employeeApp/someContextRoot/employee/24513
may be serviced by this resource class. The last URI component will
get assigned to the id variable as a result of the
@PathParam injection, which in this example occurs in the
constructor.

The @GET annotation denotes the HTTP method that is to
be responded to. There are annotations for each of the other HTTP
methods as well. @Produces matches the request with the
service method that returns the corresponding return type, and
@QueryParam injects the value of the named query parameter
into the target. A URI of
http://someserver.com/employeeApp/someContextRoot/employee/24513?count=5
would cause the size method parameter to be injected with the value
5 in our example.

RESTful web services are a much simpler way to achieve
interoperability across systems than traditional XML-based web
services, and this has led to REST becoming more and more popular.
The JAX-RS standard provides the simplest possible model for
developers to be able to leverage REST, while still staying within
a familiar and standard programming model.

Managed Beans

A managed bean is really just a generic managed class that can
be used virtually anywhere in the container. It is as simple as a
JavaBean, but can be adorned with annotations to cause additional
services to be supplied by the container, including resource
injection, lifecycle callbacks and interception. Their
container-wide applicability means they can be both injected into
an EJB and act as a traditional JSF managed bean. They can also be
an injection target for CDI, but more on that later.

An example of a managed bean can be quite trivial indeed, with
nothing more than a class annotated with @Managed-Bean.
The @Resource annotation can be used to inject resources.
The lifecycle annotations, such as @PostConstruct, will be
recognized by the container to cause the appropriate callback
method invocations to occur. Interception annotations, as defined
by the Interceptors specification, may even be applied to trigger
interceptors. An example of a managed bean is in Listing 2.

Contexts and Dependency Injection

In Java EE 5 a fairly limited form of resource injection was
available using @Resource and a few other specific
annotations for certain resource types. The dependency injection
state-of-the-art had gone far beyond that point, however, so an
advanced form of injection was created. Contexts and Dependency
Injection (CDI) defines a set of injection rules combined with a
well-defined lifecycle for objects bound to contexts and ends up
providing not only qualifiable injection but event notification,
interception and decoration. We won’t go into all of the features
of CDI, but a couple of examples show how easy and powerful
injection has become.

The Dependency Injection for Java specification defined a set of
standard annotations that can be used by injection frameworks and
containers. CDI supports two of those annotations for developers to
use on their domain code and two meta-annotations to decorate their
own annotations for their injection infrastructure:

• @Inject – specifies an injection point

• @Qualifier – meta-annotation used to denote an
annotation that will further constrain injection points

• @Scope – meta-annotation used when defining a new
scope

• @Named – a built-in qualifier annotation for naming a
bean

Because of the integration with the rest of Java EE, CDI can
both inject, and inject into, managed beans (in JSF or not) and
EJBs. It can also inject into servlets. The contexts can correspond
to any of the three Request, Session and
Application scopes in servlets, as well as a new
Conversation scope in JSF. A unique user-defined scope can
be added if needed.

A qualifier is an annotation that is typically defined
by the application developer and can be used at an injection point
to provide more details about the object to inject. It provides
semantics to the injection, but decouples the actual injection
point from the code or logic that dictates what gets injected.
Listing 3 shows an example of using qualified injection. The
@Preferred qualifier is defined and then qualifies the
injection for the Customer object to be a
WebCustomer. Because CustomerOrder is scoped to
the HTTP session (being annotated with the built-in
@SessionScoped annotation) the same contextual
CustomerOrder stateful session bean instance will be
injected and referenced everywhere within the current session. The
life cycle of the stateful session bean will be controlled and
managed by CDI.

Much more is possible with CDI so some experimentation or going
through a tutorial is highly recommended. See the Java EE tutorial for a good starting point.

Bean Validation

Validation of state is a reasonably common task that can happen
at almost any layer in an application. Sometimes it is even
performed at multiple layers, for example at the presentation layer
and again at the backend persistence engine. In order to prevent
duplication, and to enable practical and versatile validation of
domain object state, the bean validation standard was created.
Validation can be performed through the use of a set of standard
annotations and APIs, and a compliant pluggable validation provider
that implements the specification.

Setting a bean up to be validated is as easy as putting
constraint annotations on the bean fields (or properties) to be
checked. They can be placed on a class for validation to occur
against the entire class, but most times it makes sense just to
validate individual state fields. The validation will occur either
programmatically by invoking a validation API or as a result of a
lifecycle state change in a JSF or JPA application. If a bean fails
validation then the validator will throw a
ValidationException indicating that the bean is invalid in
its current state.

Developers can additionally define their own constraints and
validation logic, enabling validation to take any form or to
perform almost any checking. The result is that validation can be
as simple or as complex as you want or need it to be, with
additional flexibility to create groups of constraints to be
validated at specific times. Listing 4 shows a class decorated with
some of the built-in constraints, along with a custom
@ValidScore constraint. The constraint definition (with
its three required attributes) and the validation implementation
class are also shown.

The HockeyGame class was left as a simple class to keep
it clear of other artifacts unrelated to validation, but it would
likely be an entity that was annotated as such and contained JPA
mappings. Instances could be validated at the time they are
created, or further down the stack at database insertion time. When
being validated, the ScoreValidator.isValid() method will
be invoked against the ScoringInfo instance stored in the
game.

Summary

The Java EE 6 platform is a complete multi-vendor Java platform,
and the fact that it is based on standards means it can used by
more developers and more applications. Although Java as a language
has had more and more features added to it, sometimes adding its
share of complexity to the programming experience, the enterprise
platform has become easier and easier to use with each new release.
More is available and less is required on the part of vendors and
developers. At the same time, Java EE has retained its reputation
as being a stable and reliable platform for consultants and
corporate IT departments alike.

We have tried to give you an idea of the kinds of features that
have been added to Java EE 6, but much has been left unsaid. The
best way to get a more accurate feel for the platform is to
download it and try it out. The Glassfish Reference Implementation
server is open source and free and can be used both for
experimenting and for deploying applications into production.
See [4]
for more information about how to download and get started with
Glassfish. A better development experience awaits!

Mike Keith was a co-lead of the EJB 3.0 and JPA 1.0 specifications in addition to representing Oracle on the Java EE 5 specification expert group. He co-authored the premier JPA reference book called Pro EJB 3: Java Persistence API and has over 15 years of teaching, research and development experience in object-oriented and distributed systems, specializing in object persistence. He currently works as an architect for Java persistence strategies at Oracle and represents Oracle on the JPA 2.0 (JSR 317) and Java EE 6 (JSR 316) expert groups. He is a popular speaker at numerous conferences and events around the world.